Bygone Vermont: 19th century serial killer hid in Burlington

[T]he most nightmarish figure ever to cast a shadow over Vermont was H.H. Holmes. Or at least, considering his countless vicious crimes, one would hope so. Holmes is often called America’s first serial killer. During his own time, the 1890s, people used a newly minted word to describe him: psychopath.

Americans had been shocked in 1888 to read reports of Jack the Ripper, the unknown serial killer who butchered at least five women in London. People comforted themselves by believing that such a thing could never happen in the United States.

Just a few years later, however, Americans would read about the far-more heinous crime spree committed by one of their countrymen.

H.H. Holmes began life as Herman Webster Mudgett in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Later, when people were dissecting his childhood to get at the root of his evil, townspeople remembered that he had been raised in a severely strict household. His parents, ardent Methodists, regularly beat him and locked him in the attic with no food when he misbehaved. The boy was odd and brilliant, and other children tormented him for being different.

Herman Mudgett graduated school at age 16 and became a teacher, but then decided to study medicine at the University of Vermont. The school proved too small for his liking, so Mudgett transferred a year later to the University of Michigan, though Vermont would have the misfortune of seeing him again.

At Michigan, he and a fellow student discussed committing insurance fraud. They realized they could buy life insurance for other people, and then fake their deaths. All that was needed were bodies of the recently deceased, which they could then disfigure. Insurance companies would pay the claims because doctors had no way of identifying mutilated corpses at the time.

The two students never completed their fraud. However, the idea of making money from corpses inspired Mudgett. But instead of merely stealing corpses, in the years to come he would do the killing himself. He used the bodies to commit insurance fraud, or sold them to medical schools, which were sorely in need of cadavers for students. He didn’t kill only for profit; sometimes he killed to get rid of a nuisance or simply to fulfill an urge.

After graduating medical school, Mudgett moved to Chicago and began calling himself Dr. Henry Howard Holmes. Dapper, handsome and charming, Holmes became a fixture in the Englewood neighborhood, where he purchased a pharmacy from an elderly woman and her ailing husband. After the man died, Holmes apparently killed the woman, and told people she had decided to move to California.

Holmes’ schemes began to unravel as creditors and the families of missing women started asking tougher questions.

Then he built a massive three-story building across the street, which neighbors dubbed the “Castle.” His pharmacy and a restaurant would be downstairs. The upper floors would house his office and a hotel. He had the building constructed with peculiar features — some rooms had concealed gas nozzles, another was airtight. He had a large chute built between the upper floors and the basement, which contained a stainless steel table and a kiln.

Holmes managed to conceal the building’s strange and often lethal features by acting as his own contractor. He hired workmen to construct small sections of the structure and then fired them, so they wouldn’t understand how the pieces fit together. He often refused to pay their wages, which kept construction cheap. When workers and creditors demanded payment, he referred them to the building’s owner, Hiram S. Campbell, whose identity he had fabricated.

The timing of the Castle’s construction was perfect for Holmes to conduct his murder spree. The year was 1893 and Chicago was hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition. The massive exhibition was attracting hordes of people to the city and helping it boom

A thousand trains disgorged passengers to the city each day. Among them were young women traveling alone to look for work, whom Holmes sought out. He offered them cheap lodging in his hotel and jobs at his pharmacy and restaurant. When the women later went missing, relatives made inquiries. Holmes met their questions with vague but plausible explanations.

Holmes was a creative and convincing liar, able to mimic human emotion, but not to feel it. And he was always working on his next scheme. Historian Erik Larsen detailed the many plots of this conman-killer in his macabre bestseller “Devil in the White City.”